A 4-speed CD-R drive from 1993? Those drives could read and write up to 650MB, if my memory serves me right since 700MB CDs didn't come out until the late 1990s, yet expensive back then.

My first CDR drive was an HP4020i (2x SCSI) that was about $1100 new at Bestbuy with $100 in store rebate or something like that. That model had a design defect and after a few hundred burns would start making coasters (blanks were something like $8 a piece back then), there was a class action lawsuit over it. So HP sent me a replacement which I sold the day it arrived and got a Yamaha CDR-100 4x caddy loading drive for $400ish mailorder (prices dropped quite a bit in a year or two). Back then media came in all kinds of colors like blue , gold, silver, and maybe even green dye. I generally paired the burners with a Plextor SCSI CDROM drive to do disc to disc copies and it worked great.

I still have that 4x Yamaha drive in an external enclosure hooked up to an Apple Mac IIfx and it should still burn but I haven't tried it in a few years. The 4x and newer SCSI drives were pretty reliable unlike some of the later cheap IDE CDRW drives. Actually I have quite a few external SCSI CDR/RW drives that came with old Apple macs I collect (mostly Yamaha I think).

My drives were connected to a PC running Win95 or later and the software of the era was Corel CD Creator, Discjuggler, CDRWIN, etc. I still have original burning software from the 9x era in my collection.

What I'd do, is look for my NIB 2x2x6 late 90s drive, install that and say good enough. 😁

I'm a bit foggy about that one though, I bought it cheap surplus NOS, then ended up with a 8x8x16 or something, which of course I used instead, so it sat new boxed for years. I have two contrary vague ideas about it, one that I traded it off for an AGP card, and two that I installed it into a tower with an AXP on A7V that never really got used after I built it... (It was made for a specific space in the living room for the public surfer/utility box, then wifey got furniture from a coworker, everything got changed around, and a slimline desktop was the only thing that went anywhere when we were done. So we suffered a 1.7 willamette for several years, when there could have been a P4 2.4 equivalent XP there, but did wifey think about THAT, noooooo 😁 ) ... anyhoo.... still not sure I did either and it might still be in the box somewhere, if it's in the tower it's barely used and most suitable CDRW for a 486 around anyway.

I had/have 2 older slot load caddy drives and I never managed to get either working. Have a pretty high fail rate on supposed good used optical drives, like 70% they'd be better for using that CDRAM media though.